the silence of women was, for better or worse, built into the culture of Hebrew as a sacred language. Talmudic study was not for women, nor was the language of liturgy; women's worship was separated from men's; tkhines, special prayers for women, were usually written in Yiddish, the "mother tongue." Thus the sacred linguistic soil from which Hebrew poetry-sacred and secular-sprang for nearly two millennia, was off-limits for most women.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "the silence of women was, for better or worse, built into the culture of Hebrew as a sacred language. Talmudic study was not for women, nor was the language of liturgy; women's worship was separated from men's; tkhines, special prayers for women, were usually written in Yiddish, the "mother tongue." Thus the sacred linguistic soil from which Hebrew poetry-sacred and secular-sprang for nearly two millennia, was off-limits for most women." in the context of "Alicia Ostriker Forward to The Defiant Muse: Hebrew Feminist Poems from Antiquity (1999)" to mean that wisdom is timeless.